Waymo's Robotaxis Have A Parking Problem—And It's Costing Thousands

Waymo’s robotaxi fleet in Austin has hundreds of self-driving cabs that seem to have a problem parking legally.

By: Iulian Dnistran

Jul 27, at 10:03am ET

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Waymo’s Austin robotaxis have racked up thousands of dollars in parking tickets.
The company has paid over $7,000 in fines, but it still has nearly $2,000 in unpaid tickets.
A Waymo spokesperson said the company pays fines just like any other driver.

Waymo is leading the pack when it comes to autonomous taxis in the United States, but that position doesn’t shield its driverless cars from one of life’s occasional annoyances: parking fines.

The Alphabet-owned company started offering rides in Austin, Texas, two years ago, and has slowly but surely increased its fleet to roughly 200 vehicles. During this time, however, the electric taxis have also been racking up plenty of traffic tickets.

Photo by: Uber

Since the service’s debut in Austin in 2024, Waymo has been hit with $9,325 in parking tickets, according to documents obtained by The Wall Street Journal through an open-records request.

The driverless cab company has paid $7,433 worth of fines across 83 different citations, but the operator still has $1,892 in unpaid fines, per the records. That’s not a huge amount for a company as big as Waymo, but it shows that despite all the effort that goes into developing a reliable robotaxi business, these cars will still make human mistakes.

The city has issued fines between $20 and $519 to Waymo’s robotaxis, with the biggest citation coming after one of the company’s self-driving Jaguar I-Paces had parked in a spot reserved for the disabled. Additionally, the city has issued 63 fines for parking in a tow-away zone, 13 for not paying for a metered spot, and nine for double parking.

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All this being said, Waymo has sometimes gotten out of paying fines, with two cases being dismissed through a plea bargain. “Waymo reviews all received citations and may engage with the court to address and resolve them, including contesting cases on their merit if we believe they were issued erroneously,” a company spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal.

What’s more, the parking fines racked up by Waymo’s robotaxis in Austin make up a tiny amount of what the city usually collects, with a whopping $6.3 million going into the town’s accounts in the 2025 fiscal year from traffic tickets alone. It’s also quite a lot less compared to the Waymos in San Francisco, which have managed to collect over 600 parking tickets and other citations in 2024, totaling over $65,000.